


In Rust

by sinverguenza



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 23:32:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13087749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinverguenza/pseuds/sinverguenza
Summary: Rey resents the perfect life of Ben Solo, son of the most powerful man on Jakku. An unwanted force bond complicates matters. Also, smut.





	In Rust

Curled in her tiny hovel, Rey rests her back against the cool metal, spine aligning to rivets. She closes her eyes. Her hands ache. The wind blows and Rey loosens the find coating of sand on her scalp using her fingertips.

She wills it not to happen again. Not tonight. Not ever.

\-----

Most days she feels like she scratched herself out of the earth itself. When the sandstorms came to swallow her, she learned to fold her arm over her eyes and wait it through. The sand would burn her cheeks raw, the blowing wind seemingly endless as she crouched next to whatever hunk of metal she could lean against.

And every morning, she climbed out, slithering out of the sand like death itself.

For this reason, Rey has no use for any inhabitants of Jakku that are less than what the sand has asked of her. Pain creates strength. Hard work creates peace. Rey knows her place. Everyone at the market does. P’yarthe sells metalware, scrubbers. Klaus’ cousin can weave cheap, cottonfall cloth as fine as silk. Rey is scavenger, usually for metal. Her role is monotonous, small, but necessary.

\-----

His house is like a jewel. Light refracts through tiny pieces of broken glass covering the house. The stone floor is cool, when Ben awakens.

 _Murderer,_ she hisses at him.

“Quiet,” he murmurs.

His large palm rests on the wall. Roughness. Glass.

“Are you gone?” he whispers, but knows better than to wait for her.

\-----

Clef Solo, it’s said, was a soldier in the last war. He’d tumbled out of a sunken star destroyer and had been assigned to keep the peace during evacuation. That was years ago. Clef Solo, unimportant soldier, was important on Rey’s tiny rock, and given governance of the place after he ruthlessly schemed, eliminated, and fought his way to Governor Prime. People only dare to speak this story in whispers never meant for Rey’s ears. To question his authority in any way means death. He’s the boss of the boss of the boss of the boss of Unkar Plutt.

She sees Clef Solo now, clad in the finest broadcloth black. Black. It’s the color of the clothes that angers her the most. Clef Solo, with a fine face shaved clean every day by a slave. He wears black because he _can_ , has no need to protect himself from the sun because his palace is grand enough to keep a shadow over his head all day. He imitates the First Order off-planet higher-ups, those that bestowed him with the mere sliver of power his possesses. His wife, shipped in from a core plant, tall and pale, for she too has no need to ever exit her fine compound of a home on a rolling hill outside of town, stuccoed over with colored glass.

Rey doesn’t hate--she’s much too busy for that, but she knows that Clef Solo’s most prided possession is his son. Ben. A tall boy, a pale boy folded in amidst the hot sand, arms wound in black, black eyes always staring, mouth never speaking.

\-----

She’s scrubbing parts at the end of her day, like always. It’s hot, and the desert wind whips away any moisture on her brow. The scrubbing part is a good thing, she looks forward to the quiet pattern of it. Scrape off the rust. Scrub. Polish with water and a soft cloth. Rey lets a few drops of the water run down the side of her neck, cooling her skin and the blood beneath.

When she dips her cloth in the water again, she sees herself on its surface.

She whips her head to the side, toward the market, but knows what she will find. Across the street, on the heels of his father as they enter one of the cloistered gatherings.

"Get out," she snarls, loud enough that one of her fellow nameless scavengers at the pool turns.

Ben turns from her, and the water is safe and clear again.

\-----

When he leaves for his mother’s core planet, Rey throws her hands toward the sky and blesses the day. Ben Solo is entering an academy for the rich and near-noble. Ben Solo will be gone for the next two years, learning trade, comportment, negotiation.

Ben Solo will be gone.

\-----

At first she assumes that this is some new form of torture. That, Ben, with access to millions of credits, can pay someone to enter her mind. Her _mind_. The only place that was hers to care for, cultivate, curate. Even he can own that now.

“Stop bothering me,” she snarls at him, as she’s curled in her nest of rags, about to fall asleep. This is when he chooses to use this...whatever it is. When she’s at her weakest, her most exhausted. Vulnerable.

“No,” he says. She can see his face. The light hitting his chin and cheekbones is artificial, the bright white of a planet that doesn’t depend on sunlight. Through his eyes, she sees herself, refracting across the galaxy. Her legs, bound loosely in cheap cottonfall cloth. Her brown skin, rising from the top of her thin, tattered blanket. Her hair, loosened and waving. Lashes dark on her cheek, as she feigns sleep.

“Are you real?” she whispers. It’s the last thing she hears before she sleeps.

\-----

Rey’s poverty is abject, but it is a status to which she has ascribed her entire life. She cannot remember a time she was not poor. She cannot remember a time where she did not go to bed with her stomach wincing. She is acclimated to the pain, the work, the sun, the hatred toward those that tie her to these things.

She is not used to the unbearable loneliness that crushes her as she sips water for her morning meal and watches the sand blow into the horizon.

Like all other creatures on Jakku with sense and longevity, Rey is alone as a matter of choice, and of purpose.

And that’s why she stops being careful. It’s enough when she lies and says this is her imagination, that her obsession with the Solo boy has brought this on, that her hatred and resentment has made him an imaginary friend of sorts.

She closes her eyes.

Artificial light. The classroom is made of fine stone, red woods. He’s reading--something that Rey cannot do. She speaks 10 dialects, but cannot write even her name.

“No one taught me,” she whispers, and his head snaps up.

The Solo boy doesn’t speak much, but his eyes, the hunch of his shoulders are more expressive than words would have been. He’s surprised to see her in his mind. She senses that he is not unpleasantly so.

She bites back a curse, and opens her eyes to a Jakku sunrise.

\----

She sees Clef Solo’s wife, four days later. Her skin is still pale, but now Rey can recognize the tone of it. It’s Ben’s skin. Her features are obscured by her veil, her hair hidden in a bejeweled band of black

“Ketaka,” says the rumbling voice in her mind.

“Named after a flower,” says Rey, her lip curling. “Jakku must’ve been a disappointment.”

“She’s probably gone on xenon drops,” says Ben quietly.

Ketaka Solo sweeps her dark, heavy skirts into the light trishaw. Two slaves pedal her away.

“Is she kind?” Rey asks.

Ben won’t answer, and eventually slips away. So quietly that Rey doesn’t even notice.

The edges are blurring, and Rey can’t stop it from happening.

“I still don’t know,” she mumbles, and spits into the road where Ketaka Solo just wheeled passed.

\-----

The nights are becoming unbearable. Rey gets very little sleep, and her long days, the sweat of her labor--all of it requires rest.

Ben’s dreams wake her, and her dreams feed from his, until she can do nothing else but press her fisted hand between her legs and suck air through her teeth.

Ben has no restraint, no reticence. She can feel him twist his hand roughly over himself, can hear the choking gasps he tries to hide from his suitemates down the hall.

She hears him say her name, wrench it from his throat in the most guttural of growls. Some nights he pleads. On the worst nights, he talks. She never responds, even though he knows she’s there. She’s as silent as her dilapidated home, where only the wind spoke to her for so many years.

Rey spends two years getting very little sleep.

\-----

It’s a holiday because Clef Solo has declared it one. His son has returned. All slaves will have an afternoon free from work. Double rations from Unkar Plutt for a whole week.

Rey turns in every scrap of metal she’s got.

Rey still doubts.

It’s too real to have been fake. Ben Solo has burrowed into her brain for two years, _two years_ , and Rey knows his mind better than her own.

Yet...what if it’s been an invention of a lonely girl in a lonely desert?

She’s going mad.

What if it’s not real?

What if it _is_?

She’s already gone mad.

When Ben Solo’s transport ship lands, she is not there to greet it, though she feels his patient expectation through their bond.

When she’s not there, he’s livid.

\-----

On the next day, the final day of double rations, Rey finds the motherboard to a master console. The edges are a bit rusted, but Rey doesn’t wait to perfect the thing before taking it to Plutt.

Plutt grunts at her as she slides it through the window, twisting the excitement on her face into a sort-of sneer.

“Mnnnn,” says Plutt. “Twenty portions.”

Rey nods, shoveling the ration packs into her bag. She’s already counting them, stretching them, tasting them. And that is why she’s not careful, as she trips through the gates of the counting place, and nearly runs into a chest covered with black broadcloth. The finest stuff.

She gasps, quickly closes her mouth.

“Ben,” she says, wincing at the breath in her voice.

He doesn’t reply, but his eyes are roving over her face, her hair, her body.

She swallows.

His mouth is twisted, in the way it does when he’s trying to speak, to say the words he wants to call forth.

“Get in,” is what spits out. Ben Solo’s speeder is a powdery-black.

She shakes her head.

Ben ignores this. He puts one long leg onto the sideboard, and stretches his right hand toward her.

“Please,” he says.

There’s something about the word, the way that he says it, the way that he holds his hand toward her, and yes she knows that plenty of citizens are seeing this, are watching with open-mouthed awe as the prince of their dusty planet extends his hand to a scavenger girl.

She doesn’t take the hand, but crosses to the speeder. Before she gets on, she gives Ben one long, careful look. Every hair, every freckle, is as she remembers.

“Maybe it was real,” she says to him softly.

Ben accelerates hard, grinding the machinery together in a way that makes her wince and hold on.

\-----

His house of glass is empty. Rey runs her fingers over the rough walls of it, watching as the bright sun glows through it.

Ben is watching her, and he’s somehow shielding his thoughts from her.

It annoys her to no end. “You learned all sorts of tricks at that school, didn’t you?”

He doesn’t reply, but his eyes are flicking over her fingers, her hair.

“You’re upset,” she says quietly.

“You were supposed to be there,” he says. “I told you to be there.”

“I didn’t even know if any of it was real. Why would I come?” she says.

“Liar,” he hisses at her. “You knew it was real, Rey. You just found it convenient to forget.”

“I’ve forgotten nothing,” she says.

At that, he talks four long steps toward her, crowding her against the glass wall of his home. His body is familiar, close. Warm.

“You say that, but I don’t believe you.” he says.

“I’ll prove it,” she says. He’s so tall that she can only grab his neck, but it’s enough to pull his face to hers.

\-----

Ben Solo wears black, but his house is bathed in blues and yellow. The glass sends warm light across his bed. It’s the softest thing that Rey has ever felt.

Not soft is Ben. His hands alternately pull and push. Pull her toward him, crushing her body against his, his hand splayed on her lower back, grasping as he drags it downward. Then pushing her, all but dragging her through the door to what she assumes is his room.

They’re several steps in when she hears a door slam, and she drags her lips away from his.

“I shut it,” he says, breathing hard through his nose, his chest rising and falling.

“How?” she says, but his answer is swallowed up between the two of them, and soon Rey doesn’t remember the question anymore.

Soon, he has her on the bed, his knees straddling her waist as he fiddles with her clothing. She’s not helping. Instead, she’s staring. Nothing here is foreign to her--two years of near-constant connection will do that--but it’s like she’d been trying to feel a sandstorm from inside a glass building. She can see it, hear it. She’s never felt it.

Soon, he peels the clothes from her body. She raises her arms above her head and stretches.

The lust that is lightning through her body pushes forward like a flood, and she knows it isn’t just her own.

Ben’s kisses are inartful, unpracticed.

Ben’s kisses are real.

\-----

Opening her legs for him is a surreal moment. He’s nearly choking on his own breath--she can feel that he’s reaching for as much breath as his lungs will give him. To know that she’s made him that way--it’s an intoxicating thought all on its own.

But, coupled with his hands on her body, Rey is having a hard time not feeling like she’s on xenon drops herself. He is everywhere. He’s above her, his enormous, pale body covering hers. His hands, so large, cover her body. He slides one hand under her hip, pulling her closer to the hot press of him. At the beginning, she’d vowed to stay inside herself for this. Ben could lose himself all she wanted, but _she_ was going to be firmly planted.

She falters, but holds on.

The hot slide of him though. Rey’s head drops deeper into his pillow, the muscles in her neck are the only part of her that can hold the sweet tension as he slides deeper, deeper. When she opens his eyes, she sees him watching her. The tawny brown stare, she thinks, but she doesn’t say anything.

Sounds threaten to leave her lips, but she holds on.

Finally, finally, he’s all the way in, and they both sigh with the pleasure of it.

The pleasure isn’t a surprise; the depth of it is. She’s scratched her life out of a desert, compressed and hardened herself like a diamond, and she’s not ready to let him take over her mind and body both. Her head falls to the side, her eyes focusing on the glass stucco wall.

“Don’t,” he says harshly. He still hasn’t moved yet. “Don’t pull away.”

“ _You_ don’t. I see what you’re thinking. This isn’t that.”

His hand is enormous, so when he cups her jaw and turns her face to his, she has no way to resist. “You can lie to yourself, Rey. But you can’t lie to us both.”

And then he pulls back, nearly out. Rey closes her eyes, but feels them nearly roll back into her head when he pushes back in. The pure physical pleasure of it is so acute that it’s almost painful. The press of his mind against hers threatens more.

And he knows it. “Let me in,” he whispers against her lips.

“You already are,” she bites out, wincing as he gives her another stroke, landing deep inside her body.

“This isn’t about that. Don’t make this about that,” he whispers. He smooths hair away from her eyes, and wills her to open them.

She doesn’t. She won’t.

On the next stroke he gives her, she feels the inevitability of it all. She will come in this man’s arms. She will crack into a million pieces, but she’s smart enough to put them all back together again. She may be nothing more than an unwanted child, an afterthought, a scavenger. But she’s made of stronger stuff than the glass that Ben Solo sleeps under every night, and she will not break.

In that moment, it’s easy to let go.

“I feel it,” she says, knowing that she’s mumbling, that he’s taking her meaning for something other than what it is.

He gives her another, and it’s building. He kisses her deeply, his tongue stroking hers, his hands pulling at her hair. She feels him holding back, afraid to hurt her. Silly, she thinks.

She’s breathing harder now, as she feels it build and build. She thought she’d have more time, thought the physical act of it would need careful stoking, that Ben would be impatient and selfish and that maybe it would be awkward, bad.

Instead, he gives her another and her voice breaks as she whispers, “I feel us.”

The surge of emotion that floods through her is overwhelming, but she lets it drain through her and instead feels. She thinks that, maybe, four or five more strokes from now she’ll break, but on the second one a guttural moan rips from her body with no warning at all. Her thighs tighten around his hips, and she feels the pleading sounds that echo through his chest as he falls, too, until he’s just whispering her name over and over.

_Rey, Rey, Rey._

\-----

They’re frozen for one second, two, before she throws him off of her. He’s startled, but she doesn’t stay and wait for his reaction. She heads straight for his wetroom, which she’d only known about from him, from his mind and memory. Rey had never experienced such things, or even dreamed them possible.

Inside the wetroom is a stone bath, sink, and and open shower area with a ceiling cracked wide to the sky. Exotic plants, green and verdant, grow around the edges of the room.

Rey steps into the shower, jerks on the waterpull. Tepid, clear water begins to flow over her shoulders. She revels in the coolness of it, bringing her hand between her legs, where it is hot and swollen.

“Get out,” she says, facing the wall. His mind is less closed to her before, which means hers is probably the same. It scares her, now, the unknowing.

“You’re upset,” he says.

She glances over her shoulder. He’s a few steps away from her, his naked body all smoothness and freckle-flecks, muscled from hours of training. His body is dewed from the way he just exerted himself for her. His face is terrifyingly open--she’s so used to him closed-off and silent. His eyes, soft and _something_ , are enough to make look away, and briskly start rubbing water on her body.

“I’m not upset. I just have to clean up right away, or I’ll get sick,” she says. To show him how much this doesn’t bother her, she turns to face him, lets the water sluice over her shoulders.

He’s on her in seconds, the speed at which he moves, terrifying. A little gasp leaks from her lips.

“You left me. You’re always doing that.”

“Hardly,” she mutters. “Please let me go.” His arms loosen around her, and she ducks under one large bicep.

He won’t stop staring at her. The water falls over him, soaking into his hair, dripping off the end of his nose. She stares back, her hair hanging in loose, wet clumps around her face.

She breaks first. “What is it?”

“You think you’re going to leave this house. You think you’re going back to that hovel.”

Anger is easiest for her, she’s glad that he’s made that bit easy. “If you mean my home--of course I’m going back,” she says lightly.

“No,” he says, without a trace of possessiveness or anger. Just, a refusal of her decision.

For a moment she imagines herself in broadcloth black, tending to orchids to pass the time, her fingers softened by a sedentary life.

“Ben,” she says softly. She smooths back the wild wings of his black hair. “You’re in my mind. You’ve been inside my body. But I’m still in charge of myself. I make choices for myself.”

Her half-soaked clothes and sodden hair seem strange as the hot wind blows at her back, almost pushing her toward her home.

\-----

 

_**1 Year Later** _

 

“I used to dream of an island,” she says, ropes of her hair floating in the water, tickling her face and shoulder.

“I remember,” says Ben.

She blinks open one eye. His head is silhoutted in front of the sun. The water only reaches just past his waist. The look on his face a soft one. He’s relaxed and...something else. Some other emotion that he’s not exactly hiding from her, but is still unknown.

She closes her eyes again. “I used to long for the water, the land. Every night.”

“I spent some time being jealous of that island.”

To that she smiles, a new thing for her. A smile from Rey of Jakku had been a rare thing, a saved thing. But now, she finds it easier to do.

“I should have come here long ago,” she says. “My natural habitat.”

“Lift your stomach up,” says Ben softly. His hands are underneath the small of her back. She’s still got a fair bit of practice to go till she can swim, but floating is almost mastered.

She complies, lifting her stomach and feeling the warmth of two suns fall on her. Far away, she hears the call of bulabird. The sea is quiet, and from behind closed lashes she sees herself, floating in the water as Ben keeps just the lightest of fingertips underneath her. Solid heat next to her.

He’s a good teacher.

His voice enters her ears. “I could let go,” he murmurs.

“Not yet,” she whispers.

He holds on.

 

 

_/end_

**Author's Note:**

> Big props to my homegirl KathryntheGr8 for encouraging me!


End file.
